Don't You Wanna Go? - In Praise of Apocalypse Songs

On a Southwest flight from California to Texas, my first flight in 17 months, I watch a woman across the aisle from me fold, unfold, and refold a piece of paper several times. I’m not trying to watch her, I’m trying to read Jeff Vandermeer’s new eco-thriller about the end of the world, but my eyes keep wandering to the only available movement. The Shocking Pinks echo my feelings back to me saying “I’ve got to find a way to make it all make sense again,” because nothing about the end ever makes enough sense. 

It’s a red-eye flight and we should all be asleep but I’m not, and neither is the paper folder. I’m nervous to be flying, full disclosure I’m nervous to be. I can’t really focus on the book, I’m too aware, every sniffle and sigh a klaxon ringing. Clearly, this folded woman is nervous as well. We’re not exactly the people we were last year or the year before that. The previous us-s have unfortunately died, or at least that energy has transferred into a new form. In my headphones, Phoebe Bridgers sings “No, I’m not afraid to disappear, the billboard said, ‘the end is near.’”

I find a certain, perhaps perverse, comfort in songs about the end of the world. Maybe it’s a “the Devil you know” sort of thing. Show me an apocalypse and suddenly I have perspective, I can process the demise of all things,  I know how to handle it. It’s like how we’re all pretty well versed in the concept of the dead rising. We’ve been shown the ins and outs of a potential zombie uprising so many times that most people have a loose plan. A group of friends might discuss who’s house is the most fortified for long-term survival over drinks and laughs, it’s all quite casual. 

The first apocalypse song I remember hearing, though clearly not the first-ever recorded, was REMs It’s The End Of The World As We Know It, a song that was in frequent rotation in my Mom’s car when I was a kid. In the song, Michael Stipes rattles off a frantic list of signs that it is in fact the end of the world as we know it. He is not upset, but fairly manic. The lyrics pummeling the listener like the stream of consciousness ravings of those touched by doom or a higher power. “Tell me with the rapture and the revenant in the right” Stipes shouts excitedly, “You vitriolic, patriotic, slam fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched.”

It’s got the energy of a children's song, the feat of speed and annunciation, the song feels like a challenge, it dares the listener to keep up with the scrolling lyrics as one would keep up with the changing world and then provides a momentary release in the chorus. “It’s the end of the world as we know it, it’s the end of the world as we know it,” It’s a karaoke trick. Stipe sings that despite the end’s imminence, clear-eyed and indignant, he feels fine, and so do I. In fact, it’s “time I had some time alone.” 

Most songs about the end of the world don’t suggest panic or preparation, but rather dancing or a kind of defiant numbness. I’m reminded of Kristen Dunst’s anhedonia-fueled indifference to being crushed by an errant planet in the film Melancholia. At times, the end of all things can truly feel like a release when compared to the ongoing trauma of being present, here, day after arduous day. Very few songs detail doomsday preppers stocking bunkers with cans of green beans and batteries, it’s hard to make stockpiling resources catchy. When faced with “the end” do you shudder or do you shimmy? Do you cower or do you shrug? Do you smile?

I’d like to imagine that I'm the type of person who would dance. In his hit club jam 1999, Prince sings “So if I’ve got to die, I’m going to listen to my body tonight,” in Til The World Ends Britney Spears asks us all to “keep on dancing ‘til the world ends,'' suggesting that we view oblivion as an opportunity to live, perhaps indulge ourselves in the taboo and forbidden. The vibe, and grind, and consume. As someone who often shies away from the freedom of unbridled sexual expression (I know, I’m repressed, she’s working on it) I wonder if, when faced with utter destruction, I would let go and show oblivion my whole hole. (When I wrote this sentence on the flight I squealed a little and terrified my neighbor.)

On another flight my end times playlist asks me if I’d reach for god or would I spit and sneer. A church organ opens The Thermals “Here’s Your Future” a volatile jangling punk critique of the colonial Christian apocalypse. “God reached his hand down from the sky, he flooded the land, then he set it on fire,” invoking the cruelty and paternalistic manipulation inherent to the Christian creation myth. “So bend your knees, and bow your heads, save your babies, here’s your future.”

A day after my flight, I talk to my boyfriend over FaceTime on a phone full of rare earth elements. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I promise I feel guilty every morning. We talk about all of the American war crimes that keep us warm at night. I joke that they should let me figure out all the conflicts, clearly my shrewd perspective is necessary. When I meet someone who truly loves life unabashedly I create a mental list of what horrors they’re ignoring. You see, I say this and still, I’m an optimist. 

In a Lyft after my last flight of the week, I read over these notes as the driver tells me about a woman who died from Covid-19. I don’t learn her name, she is Secretary to another person whose name I won't learn. While many songs interrogate the speculative end times, many songs speak to the end of a world rather than the end of the world at large. 

In Skeeter Davis’s 1962 classic, “End Of The World” she sings “I can’t understand how life goes on the way it does,” when the Secretary died, I know someone’s world ended and I will never know them. In Boyz II Men’s middle school dance banger “End Of The Road” the chorus pleads “Though we come to the end of the road, still I can’t let go, it’s unnatural,” we as a species don’t do well with the letting go, the moving on it in all its various forms. “You belong to me, I belong to you,” the boys sing and the listener wonders if it is possible to ever truly gracefully let go or will we always want to cling to that which shapes our reality.

In Two Slow Dancers, Mitski sings “and the ground has been slowly pulling us back down” speaking to the inevitability of mortality. Life reaches a bit of an event horizon, after a time you stop growing and you start dying. Mitski again groans “we get a few years and then it wants us back.” Humans struggle with the idea of the end because we inaccurately believe it would be better for our version of life, our personal reality to continue indefinitely. But of course, everything must end for it to be valuable, the infinite is far too chaotic, as Prince would sing “life is just a party, and parties weren’t meant to last.”